Unlikely biopic casting

Michael Douglas is to star as Liberace in a new biopic about the toothsome entertainer. Prepare yourself for the film of a lifetime by casting an eye over the other - shall we say? - curious casting choices of cinema history. By Xan Brooks

Here's Michael Douglas in one of his indelible earlier roles - slobbering over Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (don't look at the camera, Mike!). It is safe to assume he will not be doing this sort of thing as Liberace.

Who's the bodacious English miss doing pull-ups on the fence? Why, it is none other than Jane Austen as played by Anne Hathaway. It could be worse. It could be Beatrix Potter as played by Renee Zellweger.

Oscars at the ready! The Who's Roger Daltrey plays composer Franz Liszt in "the erotic, exotic rock fantasy" Lisztomania. For good measure, the film also stars Paul Nicholas as Wagner, Rick Wakeman as "Thor" and Ringo Starr as the Pope.

The venerable Quentin Crisp makes a a grand entrance as Elizabeth I in the 1992 film Orlando. Crisp died years before Todd Haynes embarked on his Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There - otherwise we would surely have seen him singing Subterranean Homesick Blues.

John Wayne is ... Genghis Khan! Actually it transpired that shocking miscasting was the least of The Conqueror's problems. The film was shot on the edge of a nuclear testing site and in the subsequent years 91 of the 220 cast and crew-members contracted cancer. Wayne was one of them.